Selfless Portraits - Altruistic Art in the Facebook Era

Selfless Portrait by Taylor Barnes

Recently, I came across an article about a new Facebook app, Selfless Portraits. The idea is to create spontaneous, hand-made art based upon the prompt of a Facebook profile photo. In return someone will create a piece based upon your photo. It is anonymous and random which, is very appealing to me.

An artistic challenge - no matter how it is posed - can reinvigorate our commitment to our craft and help us the hone our creative decision making skills as an artist. I can honestly say that how I chose to approach such an open ended project surprised me.

As I reflect upon my process, twenty-four hours later, I feel that this public art experiment was a wonderful, private moment shared by my mind, my hand and my instinct.

As I approached this sketch I had planned to go with color and at the last minute decided I wanted to work in pencil. Color was the natural first choice because of the vibrant tulips but once I made the decision to go black and white I was primarily working with shape, line and shadow. If this was going to be interesting then those elements had better be compelling.

I started with light shading but quickly realized that the man in the photo was more interesting than the tulips he was holding. - His hands carried all the character - full of expression and life, they became the portrait.

The face is barely there as an anchor. The piece built from the foreground to the background. And then I was left with the tulips.

I love to draw flowers and struggled with the idea of making the tulips the only color or at least rendering them. But it was their shape, bisecting the man's face and casting shadows that was far more interesting than the eye-catching color. The shape was the designer's choice. I created an added element that could only have worked in black and white.

When I finished I realized that this exercise in a quick portrait of a perfect stranger had opened up the process and showed me a little more of how my artist's mind works to solve a creative challenge. Patience, the willingness to give yourself over to the challenge one moment at a time, the spontaneity of changing gears when an new creative opportunity offers itself are the elements of process.

I suppose some would call this artistic growth... I call it fun!

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate...

The above illustration is from an insightful academic paper, "Mapping the Unmappable:Visual Representations of the Internet as Social Constructions," by Adam B. King, University of Indiana. This illustration – the tin can network.

I have been very busy in the studio, with my nose tightly to the grindstone, creating the holiday line for L'Image Graphics. While I work, I think about the people I want to benefit from these images and where I would like to donate money at the end of the year. The tag line for my company is "creating change one image at a time," and with every card I design that is the vision I hold.

Something is threatening the entrepreneurial spirit of this venture and the potential charitable benefits- Google, Verizon, or AT&T (among other.) Take your pick. They want to change the way free enterprise is executed on the Internet. Call me crazy but in such precarious economic times, it seems like an exercise in foolishness to change the way people access the Internet. 

I personally have seen the Internet become an immediate and gratifying way to connect with clients and consumers. After years of manufacturing my products the old-fashioned way with printers, warehouses, employees, employee taxes, shipping and billing this new way of doing business is a breath of fresh air. For artists the ability to print-on-demand has been a career changing development. As a culture, we have only just begun to see the influence artists will be able to have through the Internet.

Marketing was always a mystery, something you had to find the dollars for or else. Now if you can network yourself via facebook, twitter, google, blogger, and anything else you can think of you will be seen very quickly. Many people have found ebay and etsy to market their wares. Or they build their own small business websites. The best part… as small business owners on the web we have the world as our market. That was not easily achieved ten years ago.

So I have to ask–if we adopt too many guidelines and change the way we access the Internet what impact will that have in a borderline depression economy? 

As I work on my new line of products, I reflect on the looming possibility that the very business model I have built my re-emergence upon may disappear. If you would like to examine the issues for yourself visit Save the Internet for one side. Google has change their position on net neutrality since 2006 and Google's 2010 position are worth reviewing. If ever, there was a moment to be informed this would be it. 

The conversation is ongoing and it is important that we become knowledgeable about all sides of this important issue because it very well might represent a turning point in how we communicate with each other in the future.